Pixel Sketchbook

Howdy everyone. After hearing about the NESmaker kickstarter, I became very interested in creating my own NES game. I've listened to a few episodes of the Assembly Line podcast, which led me here.

I draw the webcomic the Savage Beard of She Dwarf ( http://www.shedwarf.com ) which uses a limited color pallet as well, so messing around with the NES pallets and sprite economy is very appealing to me. My buds want to do a Unity game with NES inspired graphics, but that's just not as compelling to me as an artist. Many of these designs are explorations of different project we've been talking about, but we are having a tough time narrowing in on what we actually want to do.

I'm sharing the pre-production mockups in this thread, and I would be delighted to hear honest feedback on them. I don't have any practical experience in NES dev yet, all these are just made in Asprite or Photoshop. I'm looking forward to talking NES graphics and design with yall! Cheers!

Great stuff, welcome aboard

Thank you! Also, gotta say, I love Streemerz!

Welcome! It's nice to finally see some un-jpg'd versions of your work!

Thank you! Yeah, the facebook page is neat, but man it chews up images. haha.

You're Indivisible Demo was wicked great, by the way! The animations and character adaptations were stellar, and the gameplay was butter smooth too!

You're making some masterful sprites, my friend. Well done!

Thank you! Super Pitfall 30th looks gorgeous! It's so fun to see what this community has been working on. I've only just become aware of it. Thank you for being so welcoming!

Great, characterful work there! Welcome to the forums.

Thank you! I'm blown away by your pixel work. Astonishing what you are able to do with dithering!

Amazing art !

Thank you, Bregalad!

Mockup explorations of an action platformer with the awful working title of Hyper Hunter.

Thanks! I've been doing other hacks after that and I'm working on a PC game now. People here didn't seem to care much for the hacks though XD

Anyway, those screenshots look really professional, they could easily be up there with the best games the NES has offered in its time. Incredible work!

This is a NES version of an indie game project I was working on a few years ago, working title Cockatrice. It's an adventure take on Joust. I'm a bit worried about how long the sprite is, but if I'm careful with enemy placement and designing environmental obstacles, I shouldn't have to worry about sprite flicker too much. If need be, I would adjust the tail and/or head length.

So... Balloon Kid.


This is 48 pixels wide, but staggering the head and tail should cause it to take only 40 pixels on any given line. How big do you plan the enemies to be?


The original Joust sprites (ripped) are 16x20 or thereabouts, roughly the same as those of Balloon Fight.

Hi, Tepples! Yes, I've seen Balloon Kid and that's kinda what I'm thinking. Saw it on Jeremy Parish's youtube show a while ago. Joust controls, but used to navigate levels and unlock doors. Designed more the console play than the arcade action of Joust and Balloon Fight.

Reduced the size and design from 40px to 32px across, which means I could line up an enemy of the same size without flicker, I think.

I love the smaller sprites. I'll be keeping an eye on this thread.

I am insanely jealous of your ability to make tiny three-color sprites not look awful. Excellent stuff.

Thank you!

Thanks! Cheers! Gruniożerca 2 is an amazing looking game, btw.



Took a stab at some level tiles for working title Cockatrice. Still need to think about where to fit the hud and what goes on it, but it might be a bit early for that.

I'm trying to apply what I've been learning from the art threads here. Yall are so wonderful to share what you know. There are so many awful or unhelpful pixel art tutorials out there, but this please is rich with great info!

UPDATE: I just rebuilt this in NESST and it worked perfectly! Success!

Just as a quick reminder, composite artifacts can really mess with dithering. Here's what I get from my NTSC filter (colors are a bit off too, gotta love Never The Same Color):

I think that if the solid blocks or anything in the near-background were given a bit more ’structure’ and/or bolder strokes, and were a bit less noisy from dither, they would stand out more from the dither far background. It also would provide a bit of an anchor for the eye to rest on, whereas if everything is grainy, it can be a bit straining. Another thing to watch out for is that if you scroll the scene, dither will ’dance’ and shimmer. You problably know i like to dither quite a bit myself but it is something to be a bit mindful of.

It is also possible to go the other way around: the more far away something is; the less detail. Maybe this approach is helped by thinking of a camera having a focus depth - at what depth do you want focus and at what depth do you want a blur?. As always, it’s a balance and an artistic choice.

A good potential with micropatterns and dither is that you can coax more percieved colours out of the master palette with careful placement because of the pixels bleeding into one another.

This is good info! Thank you!

Thank you! This is a solid critique! I haven't looked at an old TV screen in years, but it's becoming clear that if you are designing for the NES you don't just get its specs, you also get the TVs it would have been hooked up to! Thanks again!

Sketching out a castle tile set this morning. Learned a lot on this one about how to blend pallets and how not to leave extra room on the edges of tiles for the background color. Still, this is as done as it needs to be.

This was supposed to be a sketch for working title Cockatrice, but it just became way too Castlevania for that. But I was having fun, so I didn't want to stop. Haha.

Is there also a henatrice?

Haha! I wonder. Maybe there is a Doodledootrice out there too.

I'm going to see if I can cheat some black into the sprite work by leaving the ground tiles mostly black. We'll see if it looks too janky, but I think it'll give a cool dreamlike effect to the world.

Working title: Sacnoth

You're very productive! Looks nice too.


As long as you make sure they never step on a textured background tile

It also has its downsides, but you could maybe temporarily overwrite object-occupied areas with black fillers to avoid the unintentional transparency. Basically: if more than 4 pixel lines or pixel rows are eclipsed by the objects radius, then "mask" it by swapping it. It's primitive, but could work.

Or if the amount of bg floor tiles in chr are very few, you could maybe even dedicate some space for a few alternates with pre-rendered masking for a smother effect. The stone tiles don't need too many alternates as they're mostly blank anyway.

Thanks, Frankengraphics! I'll see if that something I'm up for. ATM, I hoping that using the darkest blue for the some texture on the ground tiles will let me get away without extra code.

A little bit of background detail showing through the dark areas of sprites is not such a big deal... In older systems that had single-color sprites (such as the TMS9918 and whatever the Intellivision used), it was actually common to have A LOT of background showing through.

I certainly wouldn't go through the humongous trouble of modifying the background tiles behind sprites as they moved to avoid this effect... If background details showing through was a problem for me, I'd probably not use transparency as black in the first place and stick to 3 colors per sprite.

Yeah, tokumaru, if I need to, it'll be easy to fill in the black spots on the sprites. In the meantime, here are some rocky forest cemetery backgrounds.

Only 2/4 background palettes needed for that last one! The one before it is 3. Cool work.

Thank you! Yeah, with the early sketches, I'm trying to save one or two pallets for when I actually need to make this fit the game and narrative. But keeping the background dark and cool lets the bright warm sprites really jump off the screen.

Here are some village type tiles. I have some NPCs overlapping the background tiles. Doesn't look tooooo bad, but it would look way worse when they move, I'm sure.

Wow, the new sprites are really colorful! Great job!

I'm not normally a fan of the black background trick, but you're really putting the extra color to good use.

Thanks, tokumaru and Rahsennor!

Messing with some haunted tomb tiles. I changed all the coffin tops to be interchangeable so I could maybe work in some kind of puzzle about finding the right tomb. Also, the Terracotta warriors are visiting my local art museum, so I wanted to try doing something like that.

Messing with the idea of a misty forest that using the transparency of the sprites to obscure them in the fog. Putting some mist colored enemies in this zone could be a bit too cruel, but I think it would be memorable at least.

Messing around with some swamp tiles for working tiles Sacnoth.

Is beautiful

Thanks, Diskover!

Working on a creepy wizard's tower for working title Sacnoth.

Skellie cages look great! I kind of wish there was a highlight here and there, else it's very suggestive! Thick atmosphere.

Thank you! Wow, you are right about those highlights! Thanks for the tip!

Very nice work! Are you familiar with Hydlide 3 (Super Hydlide) by any chance? If not, I'd suggest taking a look at it.



I'm posting a screenshot of the PC-88 version, because every single console version, butchered the gorgeous tilework, on this church.

Thanks! I love the look of PC-88 titles! I've never played Hydlide, but I do like the look of it.

BTW, I love your own Hydlide style mock up that you put up on twitter a few weeks ago. Really strong stuff! Cheers!

After so many post and sample you made I think I should take the time to say that I really like your work. I hope it will be used in a game someday.

Good work!

@AllOtherArtists

I may have not posted in your threads specifically but I want to say that these days the sample you create are awesome. Since the last 10 years, the quality of what people are able to make is becoming quite high. Would love to make such nice art without fighting with the mouse all the time. I guess I just don't have the talent for it unfortunately

Thank you, Banshaku! I'm hoping it'll be made into a full game too!

Sketching out a giant's mountain cottage for working title Sacnoth.

Sketched out a creep hut in the woods for working title Sacnoth.


(Edited and re-uploaded)

Sketched out some tiles for a caravan of nomads for workingtitle Sacnoth.

Looks cool, but the shading is a bit confusing, since you're inverting the colors for some of the carts.

Oh, i'm starting to want to really see this come together as a whole! Great sense of mood, i love what you're going for.

I have a bit of trouble parsing the depth of the tree trunk. Again, selective use of highlights and shadows might help with that, towards the goal of shaping it into round-ish shape. Some tiles (left to the entrance) seem to be a bit out of place/substituting for nonexisting tiles (this is pretty common in NES games, but i think they got me confused here).

The carts could use a little bit of highlight on selected edges/surfaces, too, imo.

I think the jew highlights looked good on your evil wizard tower, but perhaps they were a little too broadly applied? Ie it sometimes is in places i thought ought to not have as much highlight. Maybe they could be both restricted to places where light would hit, while also being a little bit bolder where they remain? All this is a matter of style and taste, but those are my thoughts.

edit - re:tokumaro
I think the inversion of the carts are to reflect the source of light (the campfire), and it made sense to me. that aside, the fire-facing sides come across as maybe a little flat.

edit2 - now that i look at it again, the roof of the rightmost, bottom wagon doens't exactly follow the light direction, which adds a bit of confusion. Might be easy to do differently with one to four more tiles, i think.

tokumaru, Thanks for the feedback. What I like about sharing these early sketches is the hearing if what I'm attempting is working or not. I was trying to imply light source with a pallet swap, but it's clear that it's not landing as well as I hoped. Still, that's important for me to know. Cheers!

FrankenGraphics, I always really appreciate input from you. I know when I get closer to polishing up these sketching I'm going to go digging back into these threads for your posts. Right now, I feel there is something really special and eerie about pushing for a two color look, but I also don't want that stubborn vision to cause the graphics to become unclear or illegible.

Yeah it's easy to recognize that you have a clear ideal and coherent style going on here, which i want to applaud. Also, my apologies for pushing so many suggestions on you that might bend that style out of its intended trajectory. Please let me know if it's too much.

Ha! No worries. I've been an artist for too long to be too shaken up about people offering input on my work in good faith. Plus, you are one of the best artists in the scene with a ton more practical experience than me, so I hope you keep the comments coming! Cheers!

Oh, I see it now. It still doesn't make much sense to have the top of the frontmost carts lit by the fire. I feel like they should be almost entirely dark cyan.

re: the rightmost wagon - the trim/edge of the wagon roof is on one attribute cell (ie. catching the light of the fire), and the roof itself is in another... maybe that's enough?

These look great, but thinking as a player, it's not immediately obvious to me what's just background decoration vs what is scenery that causes collisions (ie is the blue splotchy tile just to the bottom right of the player in the caravan picture a collision?) I'm sure I'd learn quickly by playing, but it's not clear to me just by looking.

Yeah, I'm a bit nervous about that too, Gauauu. But right now, I'm just sketching out the big set pieces to see how far I can push the world with the tile and pallet limits. Readability is a big concern, but I think that will be easier to work out in production, as appose to tripping over solutions for it now. Still, it's a good note to get, so thank you!

Sketch out the whalers on the beach for working title Sacnoth

This looks like Hyper Light Drifter for the NES.
Are you actually turning this into a game?